Precious Lands

In the wake of the Second World War, Frankfurt am Main’s extraordinary urban rehabilitation and its status as a growing financial capital overshadowed the vanishing of its deeply rooted Jewish urban landscape. Once a major Jewish epicenter, Frankfurt’s Jewish spatial presence was drawn into a layered process of erasure in the 1930s and 1940s. Through years of racial persecution and ethnic cleansing, property expropriation, designed demolitions, Allied bombings, restitution proceedings, and sweeping urban renewal campaigns, numerous Jewish neighborhoods, streets, and sites were rendered materially void and historically anonymous. Yet, this absence did not mark a definitive rupture. This dissertation argues that despite – or rather through – their cultural devaluation, former Jewish immovables became potent assets within a complex network of actors operating across public and private sectors during Frankfurt’s reconstruction.

Building on the concept of resourcification – the social process through which material and immaterial things are transformed into resources (Hultman et al. 2021) – and drawing from Appadurai’s (1986) notion of value regimes, this research traces how Frankfurt’s Jewish urban landscape was negotiated and transfigured through overlapping cultural, economic, political, and planning mechanisms. The dissertation unfolds through four chapters, each examining a distinct mode of resourcification: Cultural abstraction and de-resourcification under the NSDAP regime; municipal valorization of “de-Jewified” land as a blank slate for urban modernization; commodification and profit-driven circulation of Jewish properties in the real-estate market and through restitution proceedings; and the inadvertent re-resourcification of historically obscure Jewish sites by Polish Holocaust survivors, whose entrepreneurial and architectural practices reinstated Jewish presence on in historically Jewish land outside the frameworks of memorialization or collective aspirations.

Rather than treating Jewish space as a static device of commemoration, this work recognizes it as an active interlocutor – an archive of transactions, contentions, and persistent inerconnections. Through close readings of urban entities, archival documents, oral testimonies, and large geo-datasets, this research seeks to untangle the knotty – and often unexpected – interconnections between land and networks of Jewish and non-Jewish, German and non-German actors operating as individuals, through grassroots alliances, or within institutional frameworks. Tracing the workings of these interrelated resourcification agents and coalitions across various transactions, the research exposes the mechanisms that enabled particular modes of urban development and land speculation on the one hand, and facilitated the selective ethical and symbolic valorization of Jewish sites on the other. With the built environment serving as an analytical anchor, this project brings into view actors and processes that have long been absent from narratives of Germany’s postwar rehabilitation.

Meitar Tewel